Does anyone know of a way to turn off the bounding box which Indesign CS5 draws around a selection of objects? It's driving me nuts as it's nolonger easy to see just what's been selected and what hasn't if other objects appear within the bounding box's frame!

Illustrator has had this feature for a while - and has an option to turn it off. Whither Indesign?

Sorry, totally misread what you said in the original post. Don't know where I got the idea you were talking about groups. Must be the sleep deprivation.

So no, there's seems to be nothing you can do to turn off the "super bounding box" as you select multiple objects. I have to agree that this is not a change for the good, in general, though it does give you a clue if you've selected somethng off screen.

Yeah - definitely not a change for the good. Or rather, not good since I can't turn it on/off at will. Illustrator's had the same function for ages, but you've always been able to turn it on or off as you need it.

I wonder if it's possible for someone to write a little plugin to add that functionality? Anyone...?

so I've been looking for this as well. I hate it! I took the plug in out, with illustrator, because for me it was very annoying. Now I have to deal with it in Indesign CS5. Is there no way to turn this thing off???

Bob, this is a different thread than you remember (perils of email). This one is about the "super bounding box" you get around a selection of several ungrouped objects. Not sure the answer you gave is relevant.

The Transformation Values isn't it. This is a path that appears when you have more than one object selected. It was designed to allow a user to resize multiple objects without having to group them. It's called a bounding box in Illustrator. I don't know what it's call in Indesign. The only thing I know is this option was forced on us users as a convience thing and there are some of us who hate it. Me included. There isn't any way currently to shut it off.

Bob, are you sure? I know you're still recovering from the weekend and answering by email, so maybe you don't remember that this thread is about the "super" bounding box that gets drawn around multiple selected objects as you click on them.

I don't believe that's issue the poster is referring to, John. If you select multiple items you get a dotted line bounding box. I don't know why that presents a problem but apparently it does in this case.

I just want top be able to turn it off, like in Illustrator, as I don't need it every time I work with InDesign. Let's say I want to layout a page of a magazine and I need to copy the upper 2/3 of the page – which contains a few Rectangle/Text Frames and maybe a Picture Frame – as I need to use the exact same layout for another article on the lower 1/3 of the page. However – the upper 2/3 part of the page is never going to fit on the lower 1/3 part without resizing first.

What I did in CS4 was select the items on the upper part, Option-Drag down to copy, adjust the heigt of the frames to make them fit, and – while the items still being selected – move them into place and maybe resize a bit more.

What happens now when I drag to copy the upper Frames I can't resize these items individually, instead all items scale proportionally. I don't need that to happen. And when I drag/copy the upper 2/3 pag down, below the upper article, I have to zoom in and out and go to the next page to be able to grab the lower handles of the Rectangle/Text Frames and resize all items one by one.

I can't see how the bounding box makes it more difficult to tell what is selected. What would you see that you don't see with the bounding box? (OTOH it's pretty easy to give the example of the bounding box showing that you have an invisible and unwanted object selected.) While I don't like a lot of structural things cluttering up the screen the bounding box does make the behaviour more intuitive -- it shows more clearly what is selected for transformation -- and ultimately behaviour should trump appearances.

Studio57NL complains that it is no longer possible to transform individual objects while having multiple objects selected, but I wonder why anyone would need to select multiple objects in order to transform them individually. The fact that the example given has them already selected seems irrelevant. Why would the objects need to stay selected once they have been copied? If they are a group, why aren't they grouped?

(I think in post 35 Bob is either mistaken or worded his thoughts awkwardly.) With the previous behaviour, selected objects could be transformed individually, but needed to be grouped in order to transform as a unit. Current behaviour allows selected objects to be transformed as a unit without grouping, but they can't be transformed individually. Seems a six of one half dozen of the other scenerio, but the current group behaviour is simplified and the Selection tool can now transform elements within a group without switching tools and double clicking, so I think the current behaviour comes out on top.

Me too. It drives me crazy, and I am using CS5.5 for months now. No, I can never adapt to this, because the problem is that when I choose several objects, that bounding box is so distracting, I can not see easily if I got all the objects I wanted. It depends on the layout. On simple pages its OK, but as I often have medium to very complex layouts and often need to choose many objects of different sizes, I can not see if I got them all, until I move them around. It is extremely annoying!